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Lot 71

 

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An Albanian Catholic nun based in Calcutta, Mother Teresa’s ministrations to the city’s destitute, sick, orphaned, and dying earned her much respect as a humanitarian activist, and a beatification from Pope John Paul II following her death in 1997.

Since his first meeting with Mother Teresa in the early 1980s, M.F. Husain has painted several works that feature ‘Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’ as their protagonist. In a 1994 interview,... An Albanian Catholic nun based in Calcutta, Mother Teresa’s ministrations to the city’s destitute, sick, orphaned, and dying earned her much respect as a humanitarian activist, and a beatification from Pope John Paul II following her death in 1997.

Since his first meeting with Mother Teresa in the early 1980s, M.F. Husain has painted several works that feature ‘Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’ as their protagonist. In a 1994 interview, the year in which he painted the present lot, Husain speaks with profound reverence of his initial meeting with Mother Teresa and his ensuing fascination with her figure. He explains, “I have tried to capture in my paintings what her presence meant to the destitute and the dying, the light and hope she brought by mere inquiry, by putting her hand over a child abandoned in the street. I did not cry at this encounter. I returned with so much strength and sadness that it continues to ferment within. That is why I try it again and again, after a gap of time, in a different medium” (as quoted in Ila Pal, Beyond the Canvas: An Unfinished Portrait of M.F. Husain, South Asia Books, New Delhi, 1994).

In his series of works on the subject, Husain “…uses [Mother Teresa’s] distinctive habit and her hands to effect a transformation of the historical to the mythic, the mortal to the eternal” (Susan Bean, “Now, Then, Beyond Time in India’s Contemporary Art”, Contemporary Indian Art: Other Realities, Marg, Mumbai, 2002, p. 48). In the present lot, for example, the artist represents Mother Teresa minimally, using only the drapes of her characteristic white sari edged with blue, and a single gesturing hand to convey the immense power of her presence. Emerging out of the shadows in one corner of the frame, the Saint of Calcutta offers solace and comfort to the prone man stretched out before her and the scared child crouching next to his body.

Eternalizing both, her work and her sprit, this larger-than-life canvas resonates with the selfless undertaking of Mother Teresa and her foundation, the Missionaries of Charity to care for ‘the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.’

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